I recently reviewed two minicams that could be used for “trick” photography: Ikegami HDL-20, a native HDV cam with a five-digit price tag, and Sony DXC-C33, an affordable SD cam.
The key concern when using an SD cam in an hi-def video production is to provide a seamless integration of the SD footage with MINIMUM resolution loss. If your budget allows it, go for Ikegami HDL-20 but as it often happens, you can probably spend those $15,000 somewhere else.
Sony’s PAL version minicam- the DXC-C33P, offers increased resolution (PAL’s resolution is 768×576). Let’s assume that the rest of the video production is shot with Panasonic HVX200 for its range of 720p frame rates.
PAL’s 442,368 pixels should be matched to the 921,600 pixels for 720p. If you look at the pixel counts, a 2:1 ratio is not that bad. Until you take into account that PAL is 4:3 and HD is 16:9. Shooting in PAL and then converting to 16:9 means you lose vertical resolution. How much? Pulling out my calculator… your vertical resolution will be just 432 lines (that’s 768×9/16). You lose a whopping 25 percent. So what do you do?
Ta-da. Enter the 16:9 widescreen anamorphic adapter (or an anamorphic lens if the camcorder support interchangeable lenses). The way the anamorphic adapter works is to squeeze the widescreen image onto the 4:3 CCDs. The 768 pixels of the PAL format will correspond to 1024 pixels once you un-squeeze it in post. So instead of doing a blow up from 768×432 lines to 1280×720, you’ll be doing a blow up from 1024×576.
As I mentioned in my Sony DXC-C33 review, there are no anamorphic adapters available (at least from Sony). However, Toshiba has pioneered an anamorphic adapter - the Toshiba VT-169 - that fits two of their minicams: Toshiba TU-63 and TU-48.
When shopping around, in addition to Toshiba’s anamorphic adapter, you should also check with Century Optics. They have several types of 16:9 adapters, some of the 37mm ones could work with a minicam with some tweaking.
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